LIZ CHRISTIAN
Marketing and Social Media Specialist
This month, we went on a deep dive into the urban legends of Metro Parks, so grab your s’mores supplies and gather around the campfire for these spooky legends.
Clear Creek Metro Park: Leaning Lena, also known as Leaning Rock or Witches Rock, leans over Clear Creek Road, and is the star of an urban legend. It has been said that witches gather in an area nearby to perform their rituals, and that they are most active on Halloween. As you drive by, you may see sticks propped up against it. It is believed that witches place the sticks under the rock to let their coven know that they are there, and to warn passersby. Whatever you do, don’t knock the sticks over, and definitely don’t take any of the sticks with you. If you do, you could be cursed!
Battelle Darby Creek Metro Park: Little Pennsylvania Cemetery. Also known as Woolyburger Cemetery, this burying ground is located a couple hundred yards north of London-Groveport Road, near Big Darby Creek. The cemetery is said to be haunted and is allegedly a hangout place for the occult. Supposedly, a Bigfoot-type of creature lurks around in the cemetery. There is supposed to be a small house back in the woods that is haunted as well. Ohio Exploration Society members observed a shadowy figure in the cemetery one night, so there could be something to the legends. (Other spellings include Woollyburger, Woolyberger, Wollyburger, and Woolybooger.)
Bank Run Metro Park (formerly known as the Hoover Y property): “The Red-Eyed Monster provided an explanation for the TV towers near Scioto Downs. As television was in its infancy in the early ‘50s, the multiple piercing red eyes high up in the air atop soaring antennas could offer no other explanation for campers trying to avoid its glare in the night. Often alien-like footprints could be found outside the cabin windows where we slept, next to windows where a red eye has scared the bejeebers out of us the night before when it peered in during the night. Skeptics argued that the red eye was just a flashlight with the lens painted red, but the true believers knew better.” (from “History of the Hoover YMCA Park” by Larry Robinson)
I and my sister saw a pair of red eyes about eight feet above the ground one night. It was slightly up a bank on Clearcreek Road. We had pulled our car off to the side of the road. We were of course nowhere near the Scioto Downs TV towers. People who knew the area called it the ‘Oonie’.